Posted on 12/10/2007 9:04:00 PM PST by neverdem
JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and its citizens because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”
Dr. Watson’s remarks created a huge stir because they implied that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and the controversy resulted in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But was he right? Is there a genetic difference between blacks and whites that condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?
The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the evidence. And others who later made the same argument — Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve,” in 1994, for example, and just recently, William Saletan in a series of articles on Slate — have made the same mistake.
In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Slander!
This is a stupid article about a stupid misconception.
First, James Watson is himself completely wrong - the social policies that have been tried are all based in one form or another of socialism - which doesn't work, anywhere on the planet.
Second, economic freedom, rooted in the protection of private property rights, has never been tried in Africa, due to the remnants of tribal culture - note that I say "culture", not intelligence, that still prevails there. Blacks are doing quite well anywhere the British or South African culture replaced the existing tribal culture.
Third, that there are in fact differences between the races is more than obvious - the fact that Africans from a certain part of Africa win all the marathons they care to enter being the easiest to demonstrate. However, my belief, and I think experience shows, that freedom and free enterprise work among every race.
An excellent response to this piece of total garbage by Nisbett. (Nisbett is one of my heroes by the way, just not today).
You have hit the nail on the head. The proof is in the results not the race of the cook. Social policies don’t fail because there is some hereditary IQ difference somewhere.
Nisbett is playing a favorite American Psychological Association game, in which a chosen APA heavy-hitter points out the obvious point that intelligence and skin color are not genetically linked. That’s a good enough point in its way, but not what Watson was saying at all.
Watson seems to me to have said that Africans have somewhat lower IQ according to some measure of central tendency. Some Africans are black, of course, but Watson didn’t say that Africans had lower IQ because they were black, nor did Herrnstein.
We find out whether or not Africans have a somewhat lower IQ by gathering IQ data. If they do, they do. The causal connection between skin color and IQ requires a different sort of proof than mere IQ data; it is an inherently suspect hypothesis anyway because of prior genetic research; and it is a racist hypothesis. However, rejection of the skin color-IQ link does not mean that IQ does not differ by continent or country or city or neighborhood. It probably does. Many other characteristics do.
If one's ancestors spent 50 generations running from assorted beasts in the jungle or on the veldt, it would hardly be surprising to find that the present-day genetic pool carried an excess of whatever genes encourage sprinting. The same is clearly true in the case of whatever genes encourage mental processes.
If mental processes are stimulated and used over generations, genes will adapt and propagate and those connected to mental processes will become enhanced; if not, then the reverse occurs, and genes will adapt to enhance other things and, to one extent or another, let mental processes diminish.
Calif. board suggests study of caffeine
Flying Humans, Hoping to Land With No Chute
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Well, all I can say is I’m willing to trace IQ’s with Thomas Sowell *any* day.
However, my belief, and I think experience shows, that freedom and free enterprise work among every race.
I think this is proven by how hard African immigrants work and how often they succeed when they move to the U.S.
I believe there was a study with wild foxes, breeding them to enhance specific traits and find out how many generations it would take to basically domesticate them.
After something like seven generations, they were able to make them lose most of their wild traits and become pretty much like house dogs.
They still looked exactly like wild foxes.
These types of speculations about how there are only slight differences in the genetics between races don’t really cut the mustard in terms of proving anything.
For instance, there is a gene in humans (and many other animals) called FoxP2. It is called the “speech gene”, and for good reason. They have discovered families where there is an inherited mutation in FoxP2 and the people literally can’t talk.
So there are some tremendously important traits and abilities in humans that are controlled by a paltry few genes. The human genome has something like 100,000 genes, and a defect in one - ONE - the FoxP2 gene can make the person unable to speak.
Personally, I’ve always been very curious to know what would happen if they took the human FoxP2 and put it into a beagle or something.
“the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1937345/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38a1e94c6312.htm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1827491/posts
thanks neverdem.
Unless a person has a brain cloud.
Then, I suggest he move to a remote island and drink orange soda.
(Needlessly obscure movie reference!)
Joe vs. the Volcano. Great movie.
An okay movie — but a great first 20 minutes.
Wow! so many tests all concluding with the same “mistake”.
Maybe the mistake is something else...
I remember hearing once, sometime within the last 10 years, that of the 125 fastest people in the world (track events), something like 80% or more had genetic roots in West Africa.
However, my belief, and I think experience shows, that freedom and free enterprise work among every race.
Freedom is a wonderful thing, and gives everyone the opportunity to compete and do well in whatever they're best at, whether it's financial, physical, or social. Let freedom ring.
| To: neverdem; all
Research into determining whether one 'race' is more (or less) intelligent than another serves little useful purpose other than to boost the already-too-large egos of members of the supposedly smarter 'race' and deflate the already-too-small ambitions of members of the supposedly stupider one. Add onto this contempt from the first 'race' toward the second, and resentment from the second 'race' toward the first, and you can see what little good can come from this.
Tax dollars (or any money) would be more worthwhile being spent on 'research' into scenarios of the year 3000. Similarly useless, but at least not particularly detrimental and divisive. That's just how utterly moronic such 'race'-based research is, that hair-brained conjectures of what may be in in a thousand years is a more valid choice for funding. Posted on 12/10/2007 9:55:35 PM PST by Jedi Master Pikachu ( What is your take on Acts 15:20 (abstaining from blood) about eating meat? Could you freepmail? ) |
Most variation in IQ between the races is probably due to environmental differences. That speaks pretty poorly of African-American culture. But it STINKS that the subject is taboo. You can’t trust the liberals, who have decided in advance that there are no racial differences, and then cherry-picked evidence (and “evidence”) to suit their beliefs.
Great response!
If IQ were all that matters, why are the world’s top universities full of ideology-addled death eaters?
"....the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives."
If IQ tests are flawed, how can you trust the IQ tests which show that men and women score the same on average?
BTW, there are also differences between the male and female brain, on average. Men do better in spatial reasoning, women in verbal conceptualization.
Fixed.
If they finally unlock the mysteries of the genome and epigenome and then discovery a way to cheaply and precisely manipulate and alter them, then the entire population (without taking into account race) can be tested for intelligence (IQ isn't exactly intelligence, though it's obviously often used as such), and those with a low intelligence due to genes or epigenes(?) can get their intelligence fixed.
This fixation of 'race' and intelligence is pointless (in terms of good points). As another freeper pointed out, some Africans are very fast (others have high endurance). Why aren't there many studies testing which is the faster or slower 'race'? Why aren't articles about these studies posted in droves on FR? (both quite rhetorical).
Can you honestly argue that there isn't the slightest degree of a wish to gloat or be smug on the part of people (almost invariably of European descent) who obsess over these race-and-intelligence studies and that they should be done and, in some cases*, who conduct such useless research?
As for FR, there are so many whites-are-smarter-than-blacks postings, often in the guise of rational 'science.' If you (to some particular freepers, not necessarily VaFarmer) want to be scientific, why not harp on and on about how those same studies showed Asians as having a higher IQ than 'whites?' Because that isn't the point of your postings, is it? (rhetorical). /rant
*some, such as the one by Moore in the article were probably to disprove the earlier studies rather than a wish to prove 'whites' are smarter than 'blacks' (often phrased as 'blacks' being less intelligent than 'whites'--why they even try to go for the appearance of humility/humbleness.....).
The opinion is that there is little point to the research, not that the research is flawed.
| ....though the conclusions of that research might be. |
Because no one disputes that some races outperform other races in certain athletic endeavors. Whites don't go around complaining and howling "racism" every time blacks win more medals in track & field than we do. We don't assert that the event must be biased or that the measuring system used is flawed. We don't insist that millions of dollars be spent to rectify the inequity. If someone told me that West Africans are better on average at many sports than whites, and that it's genetic, I'd agree. I wouldn't start trying to postulate environmental factors.
Can you honestly argue that there isn't the slightest degree of a wish to gloat or be smug on the part of people (almost invariably of European descent) who obsess over these race-and-intelligence studies and that they should be done and, in some cases*, who conduct such useless research?
There's no gloating at all. First of all, whites aren't permitted to gloat about anything, or even to take credit for anything. We're guilty of owning slaves, but are never credited with freeing them, for example. Even the Founding of America is now credited as being a multicultural event (which it wasn't). But more significantly, the reason this is important is that we're constantly being told that we should submit to affirmative action programs and other racial set-asides. These programs are based on the assumption that the reason whites do better on college and job application exams is because of cultural or environmental bias. That our brains are all the same, so if whites do better it can only be because of some unfairness which needs to be alleviated by a quota system. Sorry, but some of us balk at that. It may very well be that whites get into medical school at a greater rate than blacks because we simply do better at those things. If that's the case, why should we (or our children) have to give way to someone who did not do as well?
As for FR, there are so many whites-are-smarter-than-blacks postings, often in the guise of rational 'science.' If you (to some particular freepers, not necessarily VaFarmer) want to be scientific, why not harp on and on about how those same studies showed Asians as having a higher IQ than 'whites?' Because that isn't the point of your postings, is it? (rhetorical).
Because there's no disputing that Asians score higher on IQ tests. I've never once heard a white person express outrage that Asians outperform us on these tests, or demand "race norming" or scramble to find some environmental factor to account for the gap. Have you ever heard of a white person complaining because there are so many Asians in the California college system, above their numbers in the general population? Of course not.
“....Harry....I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?.........”
I can’t tell you how many conversations similar to that I’ve hear.
If it weren’t for politicsal candidates, pop stars, and various select disappearances, just about nothing would be happening. Maybe some winter weather. Used to wake up to the farm report, which was the high point of the news media day.
The first twenty minutes are the single most depressing twenty minutes of any film I’ve ever seen.
I’d agree that there is no good point to it if it weren’t that Watson was being hassled for his statement.
He isn’t being hassled because there is no good point here. He is being hassled because there are multitude of experts who can further their narrative by attacking anybody who doesn’t endorse a “no race differences” position.
We can’t bend our descriptive statistics to our narrative and still look in the mirror and see a rational person.
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